Sunday, October 12, 2014

Hello. I’m Llewellyn Falco and recently I embarked on
forming a 5-person mob to be hired for full time employment. This series is
about our journey where I will share the good and bad so others can benefit
from our experiences.

This week:

Interviewing

Once I finally figured out who the potential mob was I was
faced with a difficult question. “How in the world are we going to determine if
all 5 of us are the right fit for this company”

In other words:

“How do you interview a new mob?”

Speed Dating

I have always found interviewing for full time employment a
bit of a crapshoot. It’s like going on a single date with someone and then
asking

“How about getting
married?”

I am not saying it can't work. It’s just a bit risky and the
cost of a failure of judgment is large. This risk becomes extra large when the new
job includes a move of either your current job or your current hometown or
both.

Now multiply that by 5 for the mob.

Add to it the fact that both sides are looking for the entire mob to
be hired, only 1 or 2 of us isn’t what is desired.

Finally, the ‘entity’ that is looking to be hired hasn’t
even formed yet. The 5 of us had not worked together and the dynamics of how we will work together are still unknown. And the only way to detirme this is to take the time to allow us to figure it out.

Here is the solution we came up with and it worked well in
solving out of the above problems. I’m sure its not the only way to tackle this
problem but I was happy with it’s effectiveness.

Minimum Viable Hire

Most of agile looks at breaking big risky things into
smaller more concrete tasks and then assessing the next step with the help of
actual data & experience. So we took the same approach with the interview.

Rather than going from a few hours of talking, to everyone quitting their current jobs and signing on full time, we introduced some middle steps.

In particular, we decided to start with two separate consulting trails of two weeks each.

Advantages of the trial consult

This offered many advantages.

Each member of the mob simply took their
vacation time which meant that no one had to quit their current jobs until they were sure this was
the right move.

Likewise, no HR and no unemployment from the hiring company
if they decided we were not the right fit for them later on.

This allowed for time for the mob to form so all
party were acting on first hand true information about what we would be like as
a functioning mob. No guess work needed

There can be a large difference between stated
values and demonstrated values. This was long enough to get past the ‘honeymoon
phase’ and have a clear understanding on all sides

As a matter of practicality we decided to average all our
rates so that all of us started out on equal footing. While I’m an advocate for
open salaries I do not believe everyone should be paid equally. However, this
was a temporary measure to allowed a much cleaner start and I believe it also
leads to a fairer final pay scale.

Note: I was the highest paid of everyone which means I had
the most to lose (my rate was about ½ of my normal rate when averaged out with
the 5) and I still believe this was for the best long term results.

So we simply added 2 smaller steps between first introductions
and full time employment and it was better for everyone.

Next week: Discovering the right Physical Environment for
the mob.

About the author:

Llewellyn Falco is the creator of ApprovalTests &
cofounder of TeachingKidsProgramming. He is currently a consultant and Technical Instructor. He introduced Woody to the randori style
of programming and has been a fan of Mob Programming since the beginning.

You can
follow him on twitter at @LlewellynFalco or email him at isidore at setgame.com

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Hello. I’m Llewellyn Falco and recently I embarked on
forming a 5-person mob to be hired for full time employment. This series is
about our journey where I will share the good and bad so others can benefit
from our experiences.

This week:

Putting together the Mob

The final 5 of us all meeting for the first time for a get
to know you dinner

A very common question is

“What’s the right number for a mob?”

Of course, there is no right answer for this and we tend to
use the heuristic of

A mob is the right size as long as:

Everyone is learning or
contributing

However, if you are assembling a mob for full time hire then
that heuristic is not very valuable.So
here is what I used with the best understanding I have as to why I choose these
strategies.

Size: 4-6 people

This really came from the idea of the Amazon 2-pizza box team. I
wanted a team that was small enough to really operate as a team. I did not want
to try to start more than one mob at a time and I didn’t want the “scrum of scrums”
approach. We were looking for the “matrix of indepenant services”

Individuals

Finding the right people is always a tricky thing. I wanted
an all-star team of some of the best programmers I know. As such I quickly made a
list of the top 20 programmers I was aware of in southern California. This gave me a playing field, but there was still a lot to do.

Gathering Talent: There are the practicalities that none of the best people were unemployed, which makes it harder to hire them. However, this is a real plus for mob programming. Being able to
work with the best people is a real incentive for the top people and many
people on the list were willing to explore this opportunity despite already
having great jobs.

Skill Sets: I also needed a good mix of skill sets and personalities.
When I say skill sets I don’t mean the trivial things like json or c#; anyone
can pick those up quickly in a mob.

I mean harder to learn things like:

artistic ability,

algorithmic thinking,

sense of style,

emotional intelligence,

creative problem solving,

etc.

I wanted a good mix of these harder to learn
prophecies to create a more diverse mob.

I ended up with a 5 person mob ( 2 people turned me down ).
I had worked a little bit with each of them on some open source projects and some of them knew/worked with
each other beforehand but we had never worked as a mob before.

But now we had chosen the mob. We met for dinner (pictured above) and set out on our next adventure.

Next week: How a company interviews for a 5 person full time hire.

About the author:

Llewellyn Falco is the creator of ApprovalTests &
cofounder of TeachingKidsProgramming. He is currently a consultant and Technical Instructor. He introduced Woody to the randori style
of programming and has been a fan of Mob Programming since the beginning.

You can
follow him on twitter at @LlewellynFalco or email him at isidore at setgame.com